The Art of Disruption: RT’s Social Media Strategies

Kuznetsova, Elizaveta; Makhortykh, Mykola (7 June 2021). The Art of Disruption: RT’s Social Media Strategies (Unpublished). In: Fifth Annual Tartu Conference on Russian and East European Studies. Virtual/Tartu, Estonia. 06.06.-08.06.2021.

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Previous research has highlighted how algorithms on social media platforms can be abused to disseminate disinformation and undermine democratic processes. However, less work has been devoted to understanding the interplay between Facebook news curation mechanisms and persuasive content of government-sponsored media. To address this gap, we analyze the activities of RT (formerly, Russia Today), an international news channel sponsored by Kremlin, in the context of the 2020 US Presidential Election on Facebook. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines agent-based algorithmic auditing and news framing analysis, we examine what content RT published on Facebook in the context of the elections and how it was algorithmically curated in Facebook News Feeds and Search Results. We find that RT’s strategic framing included the promotion of anti-Biden leaning content with an emphasis on anti-establishment narratives. However, due to algorithmic factors on Facebook,individual agents were exposed to eclectic RT content without an overarching narrative.Our findings contribute to the debate on computational propaganda by highlighting the ambiguous relationship between government-sponsored media and Facebook algorithmic curation which may decrease exposure of users to propaganda and at the same time increase confusion and misinformation.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Institute of Communication and Media Studies (ICMB)
UniBE Contributor:	Makhortykh, Mykola
Subjects:	000 Computer science, knowledge & systems 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 320 Political science
Language:	English
Submitter:	Mykola Makhortykh
Date Deposited:	21 Jun 2021 15:40
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 15:51
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Facebook, algorithmic auditing, Russia Today, disinformation, manipulation, US elections, algorithms, news
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/156712